Title: Robustness in artificial life

Authors: E. Silverman, T. Ikegami

Addresses: Department of General Systems Studies, University of Tokyo, Komaba, Tokyo 153-8902, Japan. ' Department of General Systems Studies, University of Tokyo, Komaba, Tokyo 153-8902, Japan

Abstract: Finding robust explanations of behaviours in Alife and related fields is made difficult by the lack of any formalised definition of robustness. A concerted effort to develop a framework which allows for robust explanations of those behaviours to be developed is needed, as well as a discussion of what constitutes a potentially useful definition for behavioural robustness. To this end, we describe two senses of robustness: robustness in systems; and robustness in explanation. We then propose a framework for developing robust explanations using linked sets of models, and describe a programme of research incorporating both robotics and chemical experiments which is designed to investigate robustness in systems.

Keywords: scientific explanation; robustness analysis; robotics experiments; self-organisation; chemical experiments; artificial life.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIC.2011.040316

International Journal of Bio-Inspired Computation, 2011 Vol.3 No.3, pp.179 - 186

Received: 06 May 2010
Accepted: 20 May 2010
Published online: 12 Nov 2014 *

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